This document presents a framework for identifying and asserting tenure and human rights associated with forests and land use in the context of climate change policies and measures. It argues that clearly defined land rights can help identify which actors are necessary to address drivers of deforestation and can determine shares in benefits from reduced deforestation. Local resource management may even improve forest outcomes.

This document reports on a workshop held in South Africa in June 2003 to address continuing insecurity of women's land rights. It brought together a broad group of participants covering NGO, grassroots, government, UN agency staff, researchers, activists, lawyers, and women living with HIV/AIDS.

Series of country papers on HIV/AIDS and land in Lesotho, Kenya, South Africa, Malawi, Tanzania, with concluding paper on methodological and conceptual issues. The key questions addressed include: The impact on and changes in land tenure systems (including patterns of ownership, access, and rights) as a consequence of HIV/AIDS with a focus on vulnerable groups. The ways that HIV/AIDS affected households are coping in terms of land use, management and access, e.g. abandoning land due to fear of losing land, renting out due to inability to utilise land, distress sale of land, etc.

The main argument of this paper is that insecurity of land tenure is a socio-political condition that can be made and unmade. This discussion paper focuses on customary land rights, particularly in the African context. The paper reveals that:

This study explores the relationship between HIV/AIDS and land rights in Kenya, with a particular focus on women as a socially vulnerable group. It examines: the ways that HIV/AIDS-affected households are coping in terms of land access, use and management; the consequences of these coping strategies on security of access and rights to land; and how changes in land tenure, access and rights to land among different categories of people are affecting agricultural productivity, food security and poverty.

Examining the assumption that private property rights create incentives for the management of resources, this paper argues that private property rights and current wildlife conservation and management laws and policies in Kenya fail to provide the solution to wildlife biodiversity erosion.

Attempts at settling or sedentarizing nomadic herders in semi-arid and arid regions have been largely unsuccessful, partly on account of the difficulty of restricting the movements of domestic livestock in areas where low and irregular rainfall lead to scant and unreliable sources of water and grazing. But for the herders in sub-humid regions, where both water and vegetation resources are much more reliable and substantial, there appear to be different possibilities.

This paper provides an analysis of the effectiveness and equitability of West African judicial, legal and administrative institutions for:providing accessible dispute resolutionprotecting the security of the urban and rural poor to hold and use land.The authors compare legislation of customary and non-state regulatory institutions in Ghana, with the greater Pluralism of Côte d’Ivoire.

Land policies in Africa have often overlooked the interests of certain social groups. In some areas, traditional access and ownership rights for women, migrants and pastoralists have been ignored or reduced.  The rise of HIV/AIDS in the region has created new social groups who are vulnerable to discrimination by land policies. As new policies are formed in the region, it is important to consider why these groups have been excluded. This will help to ensure that future policies represent these groups more fairly.

Series of papers on land tenure issues including: Piloting local administration of records in Ekuthuleni, KwaZulu-Natal, by Donna Hornby (AFRA, South Africa)Ivory Coast’s Plan Foncier Rural: lessons from a pilot project to register customary rights, by Camilla Toulmin (IIED) Customary land identification and recording in Mozambique, by Chris Tanner Supporting local rights: will the centre let go?

The 1998 Land Act represents one of the most important pieces of legislation in Uganda, which is predominantly an agricultural country. The role of a consortium of NGOs, The Uganda Land Alliance (ULA), is analysed in this paper, with regard to the enactment of the Act. The issues addressed include:

Rural citizens have increasingly begun to invoke perceived citizenship rights at transnational level, such that rural citizen engagements today have the potential to generate new meanings of global citizenship.